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Global Warming — some Good News

A seminar yesterday at the UW dealt with viticulture – the art and science of growing grapes for winemaking.

First we heard what grape varietals are grown for what wines. Then we heard that winemakers keep meticulous data on temperature and climate, for at least 50-years. We all know that certain years produce superb wines while others bomb. As viticulture is extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, precipitation, solar insolation, runoff, and humidity, grape growing and the overall quality of wine is thought to be seriously impacted by climate change. Their data show what combinations of these factors represent the effects the best and they have developed plots that show there is an optimum combination, of mainly temperature maximum and duration, for producing the best wines. This produced the good news, the 2 deg. warming in the past 40 years has put many of the French (and other) wines at their best production ever. The Beaujolais wines have been great for the past 10-years.

The caveat was the third part of the seminar — model predictions of the climate at each winery for 2050 and 2100 were shown. “Optimum”, where they are now, means that higher temperatures will yield inferior wine. Some are over the optimum already. Thus all of the climate models predict decreasing qualities for the wineries.

And the vintners believe the science! They are investing in land at higher latitudes and/or higher altitudes (cooler temperatures). Champaign vintners are buying land in southern England. Hard-nosed businessmen who have studied the climate put their money where their knowledge is.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.